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Rest of the week's films

For his latest film, Nick Broomfield has abandoned his usual documentary methods in favour of journalistic drama, to tell the story of a young Chinese woman who comes to Britain as an illegal immigrant. After the horrors of the journey, she endures various badly paid jobs and exploitative arrangements before finding herself in a predicament like the one that claimed the lives of 23 Chinese cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay in 2004.

The scenes showing how immigrant labour is organised by gangmasters and employment agencies are grimly informative, but the film’s manner is plodding and monotonous. There’s no faulting the cast of non-professional actors, who were chosen partly because of overlaps between their own experiences and those of their characters (the protagonist is played by Ai Qin Lin, who was smuggled into Britain in 1997 and spent the next few years as an illegal resident). The trouble